Sunday, June 18, 2017

The title of the article misrepresents its scope, and all throughout it there are some real interesting observations. Here are a few:

"One of the great fights of the 21st century will be the fight for
privacy and self-ownership, which is also, to my mind, the struggle for
literature as distinct from the dark babble of social media. Writers
thrive on privacy, not on Twitter,
and so do readers when the lights are low. Giving your sentences
thoughtlessly away, and for nothing, seems a small death to
contemplation, and does harm to the profession of writing, where you’re
paid because you’re good at it."

"We were addicted to the ailments of the web long before we understood
how the technology would change our lives. In a sense, it gave the tools
of fiction-making to everybody equally, so long as they had access to a
computer and a willingness to swim into the internet’s deep well of
otherness. JG Ballard
predicted that the writer would no longer have a role in society.
“Given that external reality is a fiction, he does not need to invent
the fiction because it is already there,” he wrote. Every day on the web
you see his point being made; it is a marketplace of selfhood."

Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Somehow, I was never forced to read Walden for any class, in high school or college. And I never saw that fact fact as a good thing. Now comes a fine article by William Howarth with a lifetime of wisdom gleaned from teaching Walden, along with some sad comments on the contemporary scene. I've dug out my copy of Walden and am fixing this deficiency.